Category Archives: Life In General

The real pleasures of life

February 19, 2015 6:26 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Cold and rainy days are perfect for trying out quiet and meditative pastimes. I mean there’s nothing wrong with a good healthy athletic activity.  Getting the blood circulating, moving, doing something that requires hard exertion is great too, but quiet meditative moments are meant to be appreciated too.

In the past, cold and rainy days meant just logging into some online game and trying to kill a couple of hours doing some game activity that I’d done a thousand times before.  “Level grinding” is what we would call it in online circles.  Just trying to accumulate more points to get to the next level by doing the same thing over and over again.  In many ways just like running on a thread mill and eventually just as monotonous.

But there are more satisfying and profitable ways to spend a cold dreary day.  Spending time with friends and just catching up is always good.  Doesn’t require any particular space and doesn’t have to be preplanned or special preparation.

Catching up on work.  Odd I know but I’ve caught myself actually enjoying spending time on weekends trying to get ahead or trying to catch up on those projects that would be “nice to do if I had the time” and lo and behold here we are.

Spending time alone at a tea or coffee-house and instead of going for your old reliable blend (ginger green in my case) exploring and trying some of the more exotic varieties or just sitting next to a window and watching the rain fall as you contemplate the tea leaves in your cup.

Letting a lazy afternoon drift past as you get lost in a good book and not realizing or caring how time has past until you can no longer read by natural light. Something that every person should do at least once in a lifetime.

Letting the muse strike and painting or composing a new song or writing a story or whatever creative activity that you enjoy take over your focus for an afternoon.

Point is that rather than doing the same old thing during this seeming waste of time, think of this as an opportunity for you to engage your more creative and intellectual instincts.

You may just find some hidden inspiration that you never knew existed.

 

 

Posted in: activities, life in general, thought, time

Is beauty necessary?

February 15, 2015 11:21 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is the next in a series of writing challenges first proposed to me by Leslie Farnsworth.  Leslie has organized and expanded the challenge to include a larger group of excellent blog writers.  Once per month, one member of the group will propose a topic and we will all give our own unique take on the subject.  This latest installment was proposed by Rebecca Harvey.  You may want to look at the other bloggers listed below to see what they came up with:]

My thinking on this topic began with meditating on the topic of beauty itself.  Why does it exist in the first place?  Why are some things beautiful and some things ugly and how do we make the distinction?

We all have our preferences in life.  No matter what the subject is, no matter how public or personal, we know what we like and what we don’t like.  Generally these things have to do with the more basic and primal aspects of our being.  Those aspects that determine our survival.

Throughout evolution the beauty aspect has helped the individual find that member of the opposite gender that presented the best possible chance that one’s offspring would not only survive but prosper.  As environmental conditions change or a species moves into a new territory sometimes the requirements for surviving changes and beauty standards may change as well.  As a tangent line of thought, this may also be where fashion originates, but that’s something to think about another day.

For humans and our immediate predecessors, beauty standards dictated that our potential mates be in generally good physical condition, be larger than other potential mates, and have some advantageous adaptation to the local environment.

Of course this standard varied from situation to situation and from time to time.  Cultural norms have come to play a huge role in what we consider to be beautiful.  Some cultures will accentuate or even exaggerate some body part that is considered desirable.  Those cultures would use clothing, make up, or body modification to achieve the desired look.  These practices can of course be carried to extremes.  In certain cultures around the world being fat and having poor or no teeth was considered beautiful as it meant that the particular individual had access to excess food supplies and in particular access to sugar which for a very long time was a luxury food item.  Even though having poor dental hygiene is in fact a sign of bad health the practice continued on until the improvement of economic situations in these cultures made this a less desirable beauty trait.

As I said previously culture plays a big role in what we consider to be beautiful.  Wealth is an aspect of culture that can dictate how we or other people live their lives.  Whether we measure wealth by number of farm animals we own, or land we control, or pieces of paper we have in a bank.  Money represents power and power has always been beautiful whether we like it or not.

But do we still need the old beauty standards of good health and attractive features?  In the urban situation where most humans live,  where we no longer have to hunt for food or run away from predators or scavenge and go hungry for weeks or months at a time and where physique is no longer as important, is it still valid to judge others with those old beauty standards?  Surely if you are searching for a potential mate and you take into consideration their ability to earn wealth then a potential mate is to be judged by their ability to think, plan, and create content and thus participate in the idea economy rather than by their physical development and their ability to chop wood, or plow a field, or hunt.

That would be true in an ideal world but one thing we have begun to discover is that this human built environment has its own challenges.  Sedentary lifestyles now represent the largest danger to those living in cities.  We have access to too much food and little need to exert ourselves as vigorously as we once did.  Heart disease, diabetes, and cancers are the biggest killers of all these days.  Diseases that were previously kept in check by harder and more physical lifestyles.  Those individuals that work out and keep fit are still considered beautiful as they seem to reject the sedentary lifestyles that lead to these diseases.

A secondary consideration relating to our new economy is that you may have the best ideas in the world but if you can’t convey those ideas to large groups of other people then your idea won’t be successful.  As our means of communications are becoming more and more visual and as our minds respond better to beautiful things, even if just sub-consciously, then  we turn again to the old beauty standards.  We trust the beautiful, we listen to the beautiful, we envy the beautiful.  The ugly, not so much.  One famous example was the Kennedy-Nixon debate.  Those that listened to the event on radio gave the debate to Nixon as the more persuasive speaker but the vast majority of the population that saw the event on TV gave the debate to the younger and more attractive Kennedy.

So is beauty necessary?  I wouldn’t call it necessary as I would call it a factor to be aware of and something to take into consideration. I think we have to be aware that beauty does play a factor in our lives however much we may eschew this and even think this a banal consideration it does exist and does have the power to alter our decision-making process.

Posted in: blogs, culture, fashion, genetics, ideas, life in general, psychology, relationships, thought

An all out effort

February 15, 2015 6:12 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Pressure builds and keeps on building.  That’ just the way that life is.  The more you do, the more you have to worry about and the more reactive and proactive you have to become to keep everything going at the same time.

More than once in a while things will blow up.  I think it’s inevitable.  Then of course you have to scramble to assess the damage and to try to fix things.  Nothing is ever easy.

In the course of all of this effort you might suddenly find that you’re not feeling all that great.  Maybe one morning you will wake up and you can’t quite pin it down but you know you’re not up to 100%.  The rest of your day is thrown off by this and over the next few days and weeks you start going downhill.

This type of generalized fatigue is common.  It’s the sort of thing that can’t be pinned down and will slowly but surely seep in and affect all aspects of your life.

So what can be done?  You obviously have to address this before you can continue on with any of your other activities.  But you can’t just stop everything.  Luckily you don’t have to.

The problem lies in the way you live your life and how you are living your life and the solution is also found there.  Not in one aspect of your life or one activity but in all of it.

Stopping one activity or one part of your life will not get rid of your fatigue.  I mean maybe one part may be more directly responsible than others but I think it has to do with your life as a whole.  You have to modify everything you do to cure this disease.

So in no particular order.

Exercise – Maybe it’s time to cut down one part of your exercise regimen or change it up so you focus on another exercise.  Then again maybe you’ve not been getting enough exercise.  Add up all your weekly exercise hours and think to yourself “Is this too much or not enough?”

Diet – We all eat crap.  Sometimes it’s unavoidable.  You get invited out to too many meals with clients or family or friends.  Sometimes we indulge in a little treat and before you know it that treat becomes a regular meal.  Sometimes you find yourself eating “lunch” at 3PM and dinner at 10PM.  Try to exercise a little diet discipline.  On the other hand eating the same healthy foods all the time may make your system acclimated to a certain energy level.  Shake up your routine.

Work – The 40 hour work week is a poor joke to those who want to get ahead.  But 80 or even 100 hour weeks?  Come on!  Realize that there are only 168 hours in a week.  At some point in each day the line has to be drawn and that line cannot be crossed for anything.

Other work – You may have some outside interests or some other venture going on outside of work.  The same advice from above applies.  Remember that this was supposed to be a side project not the main focus of your life.  Treat it accordingly

Personal life – The main problem here is lending too much weight to this aspect of life. Sometimes you may have a problem in this aspect of your life and this bleeds over into other parts of your life.  You have to either address this problem or compartmentalize it.  Although I don’t advise doing the latter too much as it will inevitably escape out.  The other problem concerning personal life is that sometimes you don’t have one.  Focusing on work or exercise too much will over time lead to a hypnotic like state where you really don’t what you’re doing.  Break up the monotony.  Take time to do something pointless just for the sake of doing something pointless.  See some friends, talk to complete strangers.  Get another point of view in your life.

None of these suggestions will work on their own.  Rather it will be a combination of efforts in several different fields at various levels of intensity all working in concert to keep you balanced and working at the optimum level of efficiency.  There’s no one solution or one single therapy that will work universally.  What worked last year may not work this year.

All that I can advise is to keep vigilant and constantly reassess your personal needs with relation to your life.

 

Posted in: diet, environment, exercise, health, illness, life in general, rest, thought

Altruism

February 13, 2015 6:58 AM , Leave a Comment ,

7th grade spelling bee competition.  I get the word Altruism and misspelled it.  The proctor gives me the definition of selfless concern for the welfare of others and told me “you will never forget this word”.

Well she was right in that respect although I still maintain that I did spell it correctly.  I’ve tried living my life altruistically as possible in all aspects.  In some aspects perhaps too much in other aspects perhaps too little but overall I think I’ve done a decent job of it.

I haven’t done this in expectation of rewards.  To me this just seems the way to live my life.  Volunteering for something, donating to a charity, or even just giving a couple of bucks to some beggar on the street.  None of it really benefits me in any way yet I feel the compunction to do it.

Several years back I read up on George Price’s work on the Price equation which seem to suggest that altruism was in reality a long-term evolutionary tactic developed to insure species survival and increase the odds of reproductive success.

Interestingly enough Price himself spent the remainder of his life trying to disprove this theory by looking for examples of truly altruistic behavior.

Is it really all just an elaborate tactic that we all play?  That on some deep sub-conscious level we plot and strategize to increase the survival of the species and we try to insure our own reproductive success or improve the lot of our offspring?

Can we find that one example that turns this all into a lie?  Can you look in your life and find that one true altruistic experience?

Posted in: charity, life in general, thought

Out of ideas

February 5, 2015 6:38 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Reading the Facebook feed and someone was quite excited about a remake of the movie “Poltergeist“.  I mentally groaned.

I’ve been mentally groaning for the past 30 or so years since the remake craze began in earnest and started making 2nd rate remakes, or homages as some would term them, of older movies.  Every year brings some updated version of a classic movie or TV show that someone thought that they could do better.  One of the few things that I dislike about movies is that any producer or director with enough money or influence can come around and make a terrible version of a movie classic.

Some directors add lines, take out lines, even whole scenes.  It’s rare, make that very rare, that a remake can surpass let alone equal the original in terms of quality.  All these remakes offer is a chance for a studio to make more money on an old property.

Does that mean that there should never be remakes?  Of course not.  Some stories have to be retold from time to time.  Culture and civilization change and the old stories need to be re-interpreted to suit new audiences.  But remaking a movie or TV show 30 or even 50 years after the fact?  No, that’s just greed and arrogance talking.

Someone argued that remakes don’t take away from the original productions.  I would agree that would be true if people got to see the original first.  But this rarely happens these days. Inevitably the focus is always kept on the new version and the richness and vibrancy of the original is often lost.  People may end up with a bad impression of what could be a great story because they had not seen the original version.

The other thing that is harmed by remakes is originality.  Producers blinded by the lure of possible easy money may eschew original scripts and ideas and choose instead the path to “easy” money.

Some of the innovative, original, and even lucrative film properties have been speculative, and risky ventures that were unproven but given the green light by studio executives.

The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture, was a huge risk.  Seems silly nowadays that someone would doubt the power of talking pictures, but it’s true.  Gone with the wind, burning down an entire movie set for one scene and using highly expensive color film?  They must be mad!  Star Wars, made by a young director using all sorts of new special effects features and delving deeply into the space opera genre.  A huge risk.  But all of these were not just financial but dramatic successes.

Imagine if they had instead opted for the quick dollar instead?

Instead of just focusing on the monetary aspect of film production or making a film just to make a film why not let the ideas people develop their ideas freely and take a risk on something new rather than rehashing what has already been done.

Posted in: life in general, movies

Comparisons and contrasts

February 3, 2015 6:40 AM , Leave a Comment ,

So there I am sitting on a bench waiting for my turn and feeling somewhat nervous.  Waiting for what? For indoor skydiving.  I know I’m not jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet and that it’s totally safe but still…

 

As it turned out it was quite a lot of fun.  It’s just one of several new things that I’ve tried in the last year and that I will try in the coming year. I am trying to stretch out to try several new things (rock climbing and free running are next on the agenda) and so far they’ve all been quite exciting and fun.

During my vacation I tried out several new things including surfing (I would need 6 months of continuous practice to become an adequate surfer), ATV driving (somewhat terrifying) zip lines (fairly fun).

 

The Author, hanging on for dear life.

The Author, hanging on for dear life.

One thing I noticed during my zip line experience was how the zip line trainers were so at home in the trees that they were nonchalant and self-confident hooking themselves up to the lines and would fling themselves out into empty space without a second thought.  I suppose it’s due to the fact that they’ve done this so much that they’re accustomed to it now and they’ve lost all the reticence that first timers like me have.

I noticed the same attitude with the sky diving instructors.  They all had more than 5 years experience with the wind tunnel and with actual sky diving so that they could now just meander around the wind tunnel effortlessly and launch themselves up and down with just a slight shift of their body position.

On the drive home I started thinking about them and the zip line guys.  Basically they were doing the same job, providing safe thrills for tourists while doing something that they really loved.

I then started thinking about one of Leslie Farnsworth’s blogs about rat races not just here but in other countries.  One group of guys working in an ultra modern indoor wind tunnel, the other group working on a tropical paradise among the trees.  Who’s to say which group is luckier or has the better job.

The main thing though is that both groups get to do something fun, they get to meet a lot of interesting people while doing it, and of course they’re able to make a living doing it.

I think that’s the key thing that most people are looking for in a job or a career.  No matter where you live or what you do for a living you want to be able to do something that you will enjoy.

When you find that career or job that you like then the location really doesn’t matter as much.  The working experience more than makes up for any differences in salary or where the job is located.  Your working day becomes something to look forward to rather than a chore.

Sometimes when I’m working away and it’s a particularly rough week I have to step back and think about the times when work is a joy and when things were going well and remind myself why I got into this line of work in the first place.

 

Posted in: activities, career, jobs, life in general, thought

experience

January 28, 2015 6:44 AM , Leave a Comment ,

You know how it is.

You get out of college and you know it all. Those geezers that hired you? They don’t know anything.  They’re fossils, and ungrateful fossils at that because they pay you next to nothing and you “know” that you’re worth so much more. So you sit in front of your monitor try to do as little as possible and try to make it to Friday.  Friday night when your real life begins.

Flash forward 20 years, and you have a 20 something asking you how to send a fax, or how to fill out their weekly time sheet.

“Does this look right?”

“What am I supposed to do for this?”

“When do I qualify for vacation time?”

All those inane and ridiculous questions that you’ve conveniently forgotten that you once asked when you were their age.  Every day, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.

When did I become the “old man”? The one that people come to with questions, the one that people needed an opinion from, the one who is an authority on so many topics?

I suddenly look down.  I’m wearing a button down shirt, pressed pants, hard sided shoes, and to top it all off I shaved. I’ve become one of “them”!

When I was starting out I did my job, I tried sneaking out early or sneaking in late. Now I have to ask them why they came in late and are they working late to make up for it, and I need them to do it cause we have a lot to do, and they need to be here.

Funny thing is that I try to look calm, thoughtful, and wise. On the inside I’m panicking, confused and dazed. I wonder if it was like that for the old men when they were my age.  Has it been the same thing for every generation of office worker since this whole lifestyle began back in the 19th century?  Will it continue to be this way in the future?  Is that good or bad?

Time for me to go and pretend I know what I’m talking about…

Posted in: activities, business, career, life in general

living with your choices

January 24, 2015 6:45 AM , Leave a Comment ,

32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 strokes.

1 stroke over from my last lap.  Have to reach farther with each stroke on the return lap.  I’m in the Memorial Athletic Club at 6 on a Saturday morning.  Outside it’s freezing and I’m the only one here swimming laps.  I’ve been assigned to swim laps by my trainer for the next 3 months.  Something that a few years ago I would not have dreamed of doing. Not because I couldn’t because frankly I just wouldn’t.

Sometimes you just have to do things for yourself.

I’ve had friends offer to set me up with trainers and recommend clubs and regimens to get fit but none of it seemed quite right.  I mean I’m sure the trainers were great and the facilities were top-notch and the exercises probably work but it never seemed to be quite right for me.

Still feel like a jerk for not taking what they offered but in the end it’s me that has to put in the effort, right?  I have to be comfortable with the choices I make and then follow through with them.

Return lap, I get a nose full of chlorine water, snort it out and keep paddling.

Another good example, I got into the real estate game last year and another friend offered up some contacts in the Sugarland real estate market.  Sugarland is a nice place to live, probably lots of good houses and opportunities and probably a good investment but I just don’t know the area.  I don’t know how the traffic patterns run, what the school districts are like or where most people like to shop and a myriad of other things.  Whats more I don’t have the time to research it all so I said thanks but no thanks and went ahead with an area I did know.

You’ve got to have confidence in your choices.

If you go in with confidence in your choice then you are much more likely to engage with that choice once you get involved and you are much more likely to make the best of it.  With a choice that you don’t have confidence in you will likely be tentative, you will be slow off the mark and lose time, you won’t get the full advantage of your decision.

Walking back to the locker room.  So cold.

So is it the old dictum of “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow“?

Sort of.  More like a “A good choice you can work with is better than a perfect choice you can’t live with”

Or something like that.

Posted in: activities, business, decisions, health, life in general, thought

Are we closer to or further from racial equality?

January 18, 2015 7:15 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is the next in a series of writing challenges first proposed to me by Leslie Farnsworth.  Leslie has organized and expanded the challenge to include a larger group of excellent blog writers.  Once per month, one member of the group will propose a topic and we will all give our own unique take on the subject.  I proposed the latest topic.  You may want to look at the other bloggers listed below to see what they came up with.]

I suppose that I am fortunate that I’ve only really felt the sting of prejudice a couple of times in my life.  Most of the people who I know or associate with are open-minded individuals that look past the outer shell of their fellow human beings and don’t care what the outside looks like.

But I also know that my experience is for the most part unique and I am aware that in some situations that my race will come into play.  Every Latino or Black male knows what to do during a traffic stop.  Hands firmly on the steering wheel or on the front dash-board, no sudden moves, always answer “yes, sir” or “no, sir”.  Never give them a reason to hold you or to draw their weapon.  Police interactions with minorities have been unfortunately too well documented in the last year.  What you look like does make a difference in the way that an individual policeman or the justice system in general will deal with you.

But that could just be outdated attitudes within governmental structures and those kind of structures take time to readjust and change.  In general are we as a society or just as individuals beginning to get past racial differences and treating each other equally?

On the surface I would say yes.  I mean you really have to search hard and roam far and wide to find the most backward and out of touch corners of the country with people who openly use racial slurs and pridefully display their prejudicial attitudes.

For the most part people who engage in reprehensible bigotry in our day and age are routinely pilloried and lashed by public opinion.   That type of racism is a dying institution.

But does that mean we’re there? Do we live in a colorblind society? I wish I could say yes but I routinely encounter what I term “passive racism”.  I’ve been in office buildings where I was mistaken for janitorial staff just due to the way that I look or sometimes people will assume that I don’t “hablo Ingles” and start speaking to me in a pidgin English to try to communicate with me.

Are these people doing these things in a mean or spiteful spirit?  No, of course not.  But they have been raised in and live in a system where they see a particular skin color and make some assumptions based off that and sometimes the results are not as benign or merely annoying as the above examples.  Sometimes the results of this type of attitude can mean that certain opportunities are closed off even before anything happens or sometimes the consequences can even be deadly.

Will it get better?  I think so.  More than ever before mass media is homogenizing the culture and its message reaches out in every direction.  The message being broadcast is that despite any outward differences that we are all humans and carry the same type of problems around and are all looking for the same type of solutions to those problems.  It will take time of course but given time and honest effort I think that it can happen.

 

 

 

Posted in: life in general, prejudice, racism, thought

Reminders of the past

January 8, 2015 7:13 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Rainy, cold days are made to tie up loose ends and clean up the past.  But sometimes you forget what you had in the first place and it really makes the mind work when you find it once again.

All the holiday decorations and presents and boxes and gift wrap all make for a huge mess.  Even for someone like me that doesn’t really do all that much in the way of decorating.  My garage was piled high with open cardboard boxes and Christmas light strings and bits of tinsel and whatnot on the floor.

Trying to organize and stuff boxes wherever they would fit I went rummaging round and found an old footlocker that I hadn’t bothered with since college.  I dragged this along with me when I left for school back in ’89.  Mostly it just got in the way in the tiny little dorm room that I shared with my roommate.  Then I dragged it along to a couple of apartments  while I was at school to store the miscellaneous junk that one acquires but doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

After college it just automatically followed me wherever I went.  Finally I brought it to this garage when I moved in six years ago and I stacked boxes on top and forgot about it till just now.  The lock was broken.  I broke it years ago when I lost the key.  Took all of two seconds to break with a screwdriver which tells you how good a footlocker it was.  The hinges were rusty but they opened up easily.  A musty damp paper smell blossomed out from within. Not a good sign.

Inside I found everything wrapped up in a bed sheet from some twin bed that I no longer owned.  What was the great treasure within?

Big surprise.  Books.  paperbacks. My original copy of “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy“. All the pages yellowed with age. College textbooks that I must have thought would come in handy in my career or were just interesting.  FORTRAN 77.  Probably out of date even back then.  Hand sketched blueprints for a gear assembly, something I’d done for engineering drafting class.

Three wire bound notebooks.  Notes from classes, sketches, doodles, whatnot.  On one page two columns of numbers.  The first, a set of dates.  The second column of numbers steadily decreasing in value down the page.  A budget that I’d written down one day.  I could make a twenty-dollar bill last all weekend long back then.

My handwriting sucked even back then but compared to now it looked so professional.  I need to practice my handwriting more.

Four hardbound books with silver bindings.  “How things work”  Examples of all sorts of mechanical and electrical devices all laid out in pieces.  Beautiful acid free end papers.  My old man bought these for me before I went off to college. Still in good condition.

Boardgames that I hadn’t played in ages.  A deck of cards used to play Hearts and Spades in the Commons lobby on many a night.

An old hard plastic bag full of rulers, pencils, erasers, and a drafting brush.  All the supplies needed for engineering drawings.  The plastic bag now hard and brittle after so many years in the heat.

A cheap little sake serving set, a rice bowl, plastic chop sticks, a tatami mat, a bokken, and an incense holder from my “japanese” phase.

Wires, extension cables, 5.25″ floppy diskettes none of those newfangled 3.5 ” diskettes for me, thank you very much.  Some old landscape sketches I’d done for art class in high school.

An envelope from Fox photo labs spills out and the garage floor is covered with glossy photos. Sitting on the cold concrete as I look them over.  Some trip photos from here and there, blurry and dark bonfire pictures from some November night, some photos of old friends and people who I haven’t seen since school.  A photo of Mark, my best friend in college.  Rest well, old friend.

It’s getting cold out here.

A different life.  I find it hard to connect the person that I am now with the young man who stored all of this stuff back then. Less idealistic?  Possibly.  Much less naive?  I certainly hope so.  Definitely more banged up. What do these items say about who I was back then?

I try to think back, try to consider why it was I stored away some of these items.  I must have thought that there was real value in hanging onto these trinkets, that maybe one day I would need them.  No easy or obvious answers come to mind.

Most of this stuff ends up in a pair of garbage bags.  A few items I hang onto and bring into the house.  The footlocker itself isn’t in that good a shape.  Made from light metal.  Cracked in a couple of places, it’s still serviceable but it’ll fall apart one of these days.  So out it’ll go on heavy trash day.

If I had to put some things away from my present life and store them for some future date, what would I put away.  What would these items say about who I am now?

Posted in: activities, aging, life in general